A vibrant and original poetic voice is clearly discernible in these poems, and though they sometimes express delicate nuances of mood and feeling they are also highly robust. Studded with carefully framed, strikingly vivid, and often memorable images, these poems animate landscape and the human interaction with it through energetic and highly expressive uses of language. The use of assonance and rhyme is always unobtrusive and natural, the use of the speaker is poised and incisive, and narrative, often drawing on elements of myth and fairy tale, is expertly interwoven and integrated with the voice of the poem. Many of the poems are also shot through with a seam of dark humour, and the collection as a whole is highly readable and rewarding.
– Brian McCabe
From the valleys of Wales to the fields of France, Stella Wulf paints with words. This exquisitely crafted collection draws the inner lives out of objects, in the perfect detail we see whole lives. This is poetry that balances light on the edge of your cup and draws a slow finger along your back.
– Angela Readman
After Eden is a polished and assured first collection, tough and smart, sexy and fragile, haunted by plume-hushed owls and lit by cool moons and hard bright stars . Stella Wulf writes with a painter’s eye for the shape and colours of landscape, and the creatures (like crows and foxes) and the people that move through it. Her poems have a sensuous relish for texture, a language of slant rhyme and consonance that insists on being read aloud and listened to. It’s lovely.
– John Foggin